Mother’s Day 2026, Memory Revisited
In my locker in Toronto, tucked away behind boxes, is a small grey suitcase. It belonged to my mother and is all that remains of a life of eighty-nine years. As my brother Craig and I moved her from apartment to assisted living to nursing home, I watched how each move reduced her worldly things until all that was handed to me on that last day was this small suitcase — containing, I’m not sure what.
What remains of a life that can be held in a few handfuls? What was so important to hand on?
I haven’t found the day I envision — when I will make a cup of tea and finally open it. But one thing I know I will find, for certain, is her legacy to the world: the notes for her book on healing.
I don’t need to read those notes to be informed, impassioned, and motivated by her story. Her story is the preface to my own.
I have been as much shaped by the history of depression, manic depression, suicide, and tragic separation as I have by her spirit, her faith, her wisdom, and her pioneering courage in natural medicine. This was a time when well-trained doctors of integrity went to jail for their audacity in promoting health through nutrition, vitamins, homeopathic remedies, and the healing power of prayer.
At fourteen, my mother — Dorothea, Dottie — heard her father call out to her. She was the oldest of four and closest to her beloved dad. She ran to find him collapsed on the bathroom floor with his wrists slashed. It is a small wonder that she would grow up to become a registered nurse, or that she would suffer from depression for most of her life. Growing up in a Fundamentalist Baptist family offered little empathy for weakness. Suffering was shoved deep down — only to surface when least expected.
When I was born in 1953, my mother was already navigating depression. My first conscious memory is of a Sunday evening: my father walking my weeping mother down the stairs, explaining to a tearful little me that mommy would be back when she was all better. That would be nearly five years later.
In that interim, my mother underwent experimental electric shock therapy and insulin therapy, followed by years of convalescence at a healing retreat, before finally coming home to reclaim her family when I was nine.
She came home with resolve and passion. Resolve to reunite her family — my older brother Doug had been sent to live with relatives, my brother Craig would secretly run away thirty miles to meet her at my aunt’s home. During her illness, the treatment protocol severed all ties with family. Fortunately, my mother’s younger sister disagreed, and made her home the refuge for mother and son.
My mother lived at Hidden Springs, a rehabilitation farm where patients worked the land and received counselling. Vitamin therapy, hypnosis, spiritual practice at the very core. Many new treatments were being explored. At the end, the director — fascinated with LSD — experimented on himself, and eventually left his centre, his family, and possibly found his way to an ashram somewhere. It was a blow to my mother and all who looked to him for leadership. But it may have been the catalytic circumstance that finally pushed her out of the nest of safe sanctuary and back home.
My mother raised us on Adelle Davis — liver, fish, greens, and grains. Vitamin C, calcium, homeopathic sage pills for colds, cider vinegar and honey to alkalise the body. Osteopathic and chiropractic adjustments were the first response to illness, not the last resort.
These were the days of Dr. Abram Hoffer, proponent of orthomolecular medicine, and Dr. Linus Pauling — two-time Nobel Prize winner — who advocated megadoses of vitamins for the preservation of health and treatment of illness, including cancer. My mother followed their groundbreaking research faithfully, always seeking natural resolution to her depression rather than a drug that lifted her up but stole her joy.
When Carlton Fredericks published Low Blood Sugar and You, my mother’s life was transformed — and heartbreakingly clarified. So many symptoms that had for decades immobilised her, taken her from her children, were partly the result of a simple chemical imbalance addressable through diet and trace minerals.
In the late 1960s, John Cade discovered the use of lithium — a trace mineral — for bipolar disorder. It was finally approved by the FDA as a prescription drug. And this, at last, set my mother free. It is worth noting that the ancients used alkaline mineral waters, naturally high in lithium, to treat melancholy. Mineral spa towns across Europe, frequented for centuries as destinations for wellbeing, have since been shown to carry measurable levels of this mineral. One wonders why lithium must be prescribed when it exists in the water we could simply choose to drink or luxuriate in. When elements remain in their natural, whole, and complex state, the body absorbs them in the levels it requires.
The year my mother came home, my father bought a house two doors from her sister in the country. We moved just before Christmas. One February morning, I was wakened by my older cousin running past my bedroom shouting. Mom has hung herself.
My cousin Anne, three years older than I, was sent to be with me. We spent the day in my bed reading Anne of Green Gables aloud — unmindful of the enormity of the horror of that morning, and the fallout that continues to echo today. The children were all sent to relatives for a week to get over it, and like good little Christians, we packed our emotions and memories deep inside.
I had a few decades of my own unconscious living still ahead of me — and the eventual suicide of my beloved older brother — before I made two vows that I continue to keep.
First: the deep unconscious anguish that runs through my mother’s line as surely as the blue-eyed gene will stop with me.
Second: what my mother began to discover about natural healing — that frees the spirit and heals the body — must become the new mainstream.
My mother slipped into dementia ten years before she passed. She was a woman ahead of her time who simply let her light go out. She grew frustrated with a society that preferred to take a pill rather than get well. Angry at a system that denigrates wisdom and favours science at any cost. And finally, weary of being a voice in a wilderness of those who could not hear.
I think of her often when I do my own work in natural health — the lineage of it, the stubbornness of it, the love at the root of it.
The grey suitcase is still waiting. So is the cup of tea.
But I haven’t opened it yet.
I’m in Greece, far away in London, my sons are musicians, playing under the name Bull Harding — my mother’s maiden name, their father’s joined to it. A country duo. Guitars and harmonies and something in the phrasing that I recognise but couldn’t name.
Nick has her eyes. The blue ones. The ones that ran through her line like a gene that knew exactly what it was doing.
She never heard them play. But I think she’d recognise the sound.
But I know what I’ll find when I open it. I’ve been living it all along.
— Marilyn, Aegina Island